AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The theme for this issue of Axon emerged during a conference in late 2019, where paper after paper combined coherent research with impassioned critiques of the state of the university, the state of the environment, and the state of politics. Evident in these presentations was both a determination to generate positive change, and impatience at the apparent slowness of senior members’ responses to the what-is of the current moment. It seemed timely to provide a platform for these concerns, and invite contributions that combine personal, political and scholarly passions; and the manifesto form seemed to have the right combination of elements for this context.' (Introduction)
Notes
-
Only literary material by Australian authors or with Australian themes are individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Despairimentalist Manifesto by HL Hix
The Loneliness by Mark Roper
A Vision of Water by James Harpur
The Rhetoric of Emergency by Oz Hardwick
What are You Telling Now? by Drager Meurtant
Creative Frailty by Lesley Saunders
Academic Happenstance by Brenda Cooper
The Text is a Plastic Thing by Lauren Terry
Contents
- Five Poems about Australia, sequence poetry
-
Backdrop and Reason,
single work
essay
'During late summer into winter, March through July 2019, an enormous privilege befell me: I spent five months observing the astonishing wildlife of Australia to prepare to write a sequence of poems. To that end, and as an American Fulbright Senior Scholar, I was welcomed into the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra while also — with my husband — volunteering at Tidbinbilla, that cherished nature reserve, and briefly at ACT Wildlife to help bottle-feed orphaned joeys. Elsewhere I was engaged in conversations with poets and wildlife people throughout the country, including the Outback.' (Introduction)
- She of The Rescue Centre Answeredi"first thing —", single work poetry
- The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish Likei"The Crown-of-Thorns Starfish like", single work poetry
- A Kangaroo in Flighti"or bent forward, set to spring off bark", single work poetry
- Out There for The Famous Balloons —i"the colourful sort that go up with little baskets of", single work poetry
- Four Ways to Remember the Koalai"1) It never was a bear.", single work poetry
- Writing With Swamp: An E-Co[|]Lab Mani-Fe[A]St[O], single work prose
-
Jenga, Kafka, and the Triumph Of Academic Capitalism : A Taxonomy of Scholars and Their COVID Capital,
single work
essay
'As universities around Australia sever entire schools and faculties, others face collapse entirely. An over-dependence on international revenue and an unhappy marriage with the federal government had many universities already feeling some discomfort before COVID-19 exacerbated the pain. Whether universities rapidly decline, or languish and recover, they will undoubtedly see more violent restructuring as they transition into the recovery and renewal phase. In the meantime, the absence of any tangible assistance from the government, combined with mostly short-sighted cost reduction strategies, mean that a sector-wide crisis has now been left to individual universities to manage alone. As Teresa Tija et al. explain, ‘The immediate response of Australian universities was to defer capital works spending, reduce non-salary expenditure, scale back the use of casual and fixed-term staff, and introduce other short-term measures’ (2020: 3). These emergency surgeries, which in many cases have been performed without anaesthesia, reveal that universities need a more innovative ethical strategy for triaging and treating the many systemic disorders that the virus has not only aggravated but also exposed. As several academics have already observed, Australian universities were sick before the pandemic (Kunkler 2020; Zaglas 2020). Indeed, the commodification and destruction of ‘all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine’ (Bourdieu 1998: 4) ensures that those commodified most — that is, the precariat — can do little to save the university from its self-cannibalising tendencies.' (Introduction)
-
A Mouth Swallowing the Storm : A Fugue for Uncountable Voices,
single work
prose
'In this text three emergent accomplices — Krill, Spore and Terra — give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. They express an ‘animistic perception’ mirroring humans’ ‘default setting’ to ‘encounter ... sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers’ (Abrams 2019, n.p.). These voices without organs, arising from an alembic transcribed with arcane symbols, had been channeled by In Her Interior (IHI) through field trips, programmatic word theft and the fugue-induced sympoiesis (Dempster 2000) of collaborative writing across timespace and collective production in open systems; inviting surprise, disappointment, destabilisation, crisis, fleeting resolution and homeostasis. The iterative conditions of making were creation-destruction-crisis-creation anew. And thus the results were generative and theoretically repeatable.' (Introduction)
-
Fractography as Assemblage,
single work
prose
'This creatively-critical collaboration confronts issues of precarious employment in contemporary universities. As three early career academics currently employed on casual or fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, we have produced a writing-based fractography — a study of cracks — in order to show the effects of what Bill Readings has called ‘the ruined university’ on the bodies, minds, and lives of academic workers. To produce this work, each of us penned an individual narrative employing cracks as a metaphor for our lived experiences of working in academia. We then spliced the three separate accounts into fragments and combined them into a single text, interwoven with quotations from published sources. The quoted materials set the personal against the political, showing how our individual and particular experiences reflect specific but non-isolated instances of a much bigger, shared problem. Our polyvocal collaboration thus forms an instance of what Drager Meurtant describes in terms of ‘artistic assemblage’. In line with Cathryn Perazzo and Patrick West, we engage this approach in order to affect ‘non-didactic didacticism’ in our critique of the socio-political problems rife throughout academia today.' (Publication abstract)
-
We Don’t Want to Go Back To ‘Normal’, When ‘Normal’ Wasn’t Good for Everyone,
single work
essay
'Alongside the disruptions caused by the spread of COVID-19 we have heard discourses reflect the theme of normality. Preventative measures employed to ‘flatten the curve’ and stop the spread of disease are often spoken of as creating a temporary ‘new norm’, while a post-COVID-19 world is seen as marking a return to ‘normality’. Positioned within a context defined by heightened uncertainty, anxiety and an urgency to respond to arising health, economic, and other social crises, in this paper we consider what a pre-COVID-19 normal means for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and whether it is something we aspire to return to. Unpacking topics relating to Black deaths in custody and the Black Lives Matter movement we consider the systemic failure of dominant White systems of governance that continuously prove themselves incapable of addressing and responding to the Indigenous voices they claim to represent. Throughout our paper we encourage a deeper consideration of the need to create to a lasting new norm that protects, is informed by, represents, and directly involves Indigenous peoples and their representative bodies. Exemplified by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, we argue that a new norm — which is not characterised by Indigenous socio-economic disadvantages and disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations — must be one where an Indigenous voice is enshrined within the parliamentary process. A new norm must build on the foundation created by the countless Indigenous activists, past and present, who have laid the tracks leading towards meaningful reforms that engages Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. No longer are tokenistic or symbolic gestures of recognition acceptable. The time for a new normal is now.' (Publication abstract)
- We Thought We Knew What Summer Was, single work prose poetry
-
Master’s Tools, Master’s House,
single work
essay
'The attention being paid to the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic, the environmental destruction caused by changing climate, and the economic challenges of poverty and the obsessive drive to development, are all providing a cover to hide another social disaster. ' (Introduction)
- All the Old Crimesi"All the old crimes, all the old violence continues.", single work poetry
-
Cruising into Covid,
single work
essay
'When thinking about the focus of this issue of Axon on ‘natural, environmental and epidemiological disasters’ it would be hard to go past COVID-19, not only because of its topicality but because it fits all three adjectives. The possible exception is ‘environmental’: while the virus is a feature of the very air we breathe, in many parts of the world it has reduced air pollution and opened up previously prohibited spaces to the animal kingdom. Monkeys run amok in Thai towns, dolphins leap higher than normal in the ship-free Mediterranean around Malta. For almost anyone alive today the virological crisis is the most extraordinary experience of their lives — arguably more threatening than any of the wars with which it is analogised.' (Introduction)
- Adrifti"We loll about on a languid,", single work poetry
- Plunge and Rise and Sideways Lurchi"Alert, out on the empty ocean", single work poetry
- Outlooksi"Tiny water drops scroll together,", single work poetry
- A Meditation in Time of Virusi"A strangely lethargic Sunday afternoon", single work poetry